Peter Gays five-volume study The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to
Freud was a massive history of middle-class culture. Now comes a
single volume which (though not, as he puts it, a Readers Digest
condensation of the previous work) distils the enormous amount of
material in the previous books. In order perhaps to make it more
palatable to the common reader, or simply to give it fresh impetus,
Professor Gay has linked it to the life and work of the somewhat
neurotic Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, in
particular to the diary he kept for many years. Schnitzler, Gay
remarks, danced on the edge of bourgeois respectability, revealing
a great deal, in the pre- and post-Freudian world of Vienna, about
the sexual mores of his contemporaries. The author gives
considerable space to sex, as well as to womens history, social
conditions and religious and cultural history, dealing with
Victorian attitudes to the home, to male and female aggression,
anxiety, taste and so on as seen through the prism of Schnitzlers
own behaviour and personality. Gay is critical of previous books on
the period, which he finds confused and too often narrow and
stifling. His own approach to history is psychoanalytical, and he
fundamentally reinterprets generally accepted views about the
Victorian bourgeoisie, particularly with regard to middle-class
attitudes to life. He uses the term Victorian to encapsulate a
period, rather than relating it solely to life in England - his
book ranges across Europe and America. This is a fascinating book
which, although it focuses strongly on what the author believes to
be a mistaken 20th-century conception of Victorian sexuality, deals
with every aspect of what may seem to be a dead world, but
nevertheless lives strongly in the subconscious of 21st-century men
and women. (Kirkus UK)
"This is cultural history of the first order, and it is liberal and humane history at its very best."—David Cannadine
An essential work for anyone who wishes to understand the social history of the nineteenth century, Schnitzler's Century is the culmination of Peter Gay's thirty-five years of scholarship on bourgeois culture and society. Using Arthur Schnitzler, the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright, as his master of ceremonies, Gay offers a brilliant reexamination of the hundred-year period that began with the defeat of Napoleon and concluded with the conflagration of 1914. This is a defining work by one of America's greatest historians. 12 b/w illustrations.
"If the past is envisioned as a foreign country, then there is no one, living or dead, better suited to serve as our guide than Peter Gay. In Schnitzler's Century, he has distilled a lifetime of learning into 320 pages of sparkling prose....I can't remember the last time I had such fun—and learned so much—from any work of history or nonfiction."—David Nasaw, winner of the Bancroft Prize for The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
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